Calinet
Last updated | 25/04/2007
" My father told me the internet was a scam," confesses Paul Edwards as he leans back on one of the large leather armchairs in the lounge of his own hotel, "Now he's sunning himself on a Spanish beach with the profits I've made."
Paul took over the Dunalastair Hotel in Kinloch Rannoch five years ago after his parents, who had bought it as a retirement investment, "ran the place into the ground." At 22-years-old, the International Politics graduate with no hotelier experience had to learn the trade extremely quickly.
" It was in a state," he admits, "People were put off by the leaking roofs and damp corridors. We had no return customers and bookings were drying up. At one point we had just 2 people staying at the height of the summer season."
Tens of thousands of pounds were spent refurbishing the building, with some material bought at rock bottom prices from other hotels including the Caledonian in Edinburgh and Gleneagles, but the young entrepreneur still had to get the word around.
" I began offering our rooms through a website," he explained. "A few days after the first one went up we got a booking. This couple turned up in a Golf GTI, stayed the night, then sped off the next morning. I just thought, well, there must be more where they came from and it started from there."
As the demand for the Dunalastair's 25 rooms began to grow, with 2,000 emails a month buzzing in from across the world, Paul realised he was onto a good thing and bought the internet company he had used to put the hotel on the web in the first place.
Re-establishing it as Calinet.co.uk, he began offering his services to other hotels in the UK as an internet service provider and web design company, creating and hosting their sites. Clients include the Holiday Inn Express chain in Scotland and Gleneagles.
The company employs 7 people, all recruited on the internet and coming from a variety of countries.
" An advantage to be being based in Kinloch Rannoch," said Paul, "is we can offer potential staff unique perks, like white-water rafting, which attract a lot of the right people. We're certainly never short of applicants."
Profit and turnover for the internet firm remains relatively small in comparison to the hotel which has doubled its value to £850,000 since Paul took over the reigns and produces £150,000 profit per year. But he maintains that the small size has actually helped the company stay alive.
He said: "The dot com crash didn't really affect us because we were never really a high flyer. We had no funders to repay or that kind of thing, so we got through unscathed. Before it happened, though, my father thought I was a multimillionaire, which I'm not. But we started the company with £500 and it's worth a bit more than that now."
